“Dishonest men can be bought and ignorant men can be manipulated. This is the kind of government which private capital, invested in public-service industries, naturally feels that it must have.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)
“While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” — James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”
“The beginning of everything is damp and small, but wide-armed oaks—according to myth, legend, and the folk tales of the people—from solitary acorns grow.” — Grace Paley, “In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All”
“Doctors mostly sustain themselves in a medium of false ideas, the word ‘doctor’ casting about them, so they think, a sort of magical aura.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (emphasis in original)
“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“Push your mind too hard and it will fuck up like an overloaded switchboard, or turn on you with sabotage.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“There can be no doubt that American literature has considerably suffered from the platitudinous didactic note.” — George S. Hellman, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Book III, Ch. XIII, Sec. 16
“A functioning police state needs no police.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (emphasis in original)
“Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“Honor is conscious and willing loyalty to the highest inward leading. It is the quality which cannot be insulted.” — George William Curtis (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XIII, Sec. 4)
“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life–and herein lies its secret–takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” — Milan Hubl (quoted in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Heim)
“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“Police files are our only claim to immortality.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (trans. Heim)
“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” — Teju Cole, Open City
“If you’re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.” — Teju Cole, Open City
“There is always a bull market for vengeance and violence in America.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Different people want different things in this world, and you have to be careful about taking risks. Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts. A thing that seemed strange and wrong yesterday can seem perfectly reasonable tomorrow, or vice versa.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Everybody you see these days might have the power to get you locked up…. Who knows why? They will have reasons straight out of some horrible Kafka story, but in the end it won’t matter any more than a full moon behind clouds.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear (ellipsis in original)
“Vicious thieves have always ruled the world.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything–especially not if he seems to believe you are guilty of a crime. Maybe he has no evidence. Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe you are innocent. Maybe. The Law can be hazy on these things.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“The only real difference between the Sane and the Insane, in this world, is the Sane have the power to have the Insane locked up.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear